Northway reopens; as many as 20 people injured in multi-car pile-up

SARATOGA SPRINGS -- More than a dozen cars, trucks and tractor trailers were involved in a multi-car pile-up on the Northway that injured as many as 20 people.

Details on exactly how many people went to the hospital were still in-flux Saturday night, but early reports over the police scanner indicated an ambulance was on its way to Saratoga Hospital with five patients with as many as 15 to follow.

At the scene of the accident, at least half-a-dozen cars were off the road, many smashed to some extent. There were as many as ten more in the road that were involved in the accident.

One car was trapped under a tractor-trailer. A mini-van looked as it had been struck in the side by another vehicle and a Ford sedan was nearby, facing the wrong direction, its hood caved in.

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Many of the motorists were still in their vehicles more than an hour after the accident, gridlocked by emergency vehicles, tow trucks and smashed cars. On and along the side of the road were pieces of vehicle that firefighters absent-mindedly kicked aside as they went about untangling the mass of cars.

Damaged vehicles stretched along about a quarter-mile stretch of the southbound lanes of I-87 centered at the Jones Road Bridge that crosses over the Northway. There, a Ford Taurus was sitting across the road with a pickup truck enmeshed in its passenger-side door.

The driver of the Ford, Michael Tesch, 21, said he started to slide and crash into cars about a hundred yards back from where his car ended up. He was sitting in the back seat of the truck that eventually hit his car with the driver and passengers of that vehicle.

"My guess it was snowing so hard that no one could see there was an accident in front of them and they started piling up," he said. "That's what happened to me.

"I couldn't really see the cars stopped in front of me and that's when I slid and hit a bunch of cars," he said. At that point, though, he said there were already cars that had hit one another.

Tesch was not injured, but the driver's side rear wheel of his car was nearly torn off and the hood was smashed in, along with the damage where the truck hit his car.

The driver of the truck had a one-word explanation for the crash: "ice."

Roads were slippery. Less than a mile from Exit 16 was another accident, though only involving two vehicles.